Mangusta thread

Aloha Frank, ya gotta admit....I am building up anticipation! Gotta get this car out for show someday soon, hang in.

 

this turned up the past few days....reading through the comments it is becoming apparent that MOST people just LOVE these bada$$ exotics!

http://bringatrailer.com/2012/02/14/fresh-1970-detomaso-mangusta/

...this commentary from noted DeTomaso expert Mike Drew has some great information on the 'state of the Mangusta market'

...and I added a photo for somethin' visual

Mike Drew here, editor of the quarterly magazine for POCA, the Pantera owners Club of America (which also welcomes all De Tomaso cars, including Mangustas). I thought I’d address a few of the comments above and clear up some misconceptions about these spectacular (and spectacularly flawed) cars.

This car wears Belgian plates, so almost assuredly it was sold by Belgian De Tomaso (and Shelby/GT40) agent Claude Dubois. Claude is well into his 70s now and is a great friend of mine—we spend summer holidays together riding motorcycles in the Alps, or hanging out at his summer home in the mountains of Provence. In the winter he lives in Brussels. He still has all his original sales records, so if we had the VIN he could provide the basic details of the car, and the first owner name/location.

I agree, the valve covers are a bit tacky. Originally Mangustas had stock Ford engines (early Euro cars got Shelby-spec 289s but most got VERY weak 230-hp 302s). They wore standard stamped tin Ford valve covers, with beautiful De Tomaso castings glued to the top to give them some pizzazz. Most of them are long gone after the glue went through enough heat cycles so they clattered to the ground and disappeared. The Panteras received a similar treatment, but the plaque was simplified and the shape changed, so genuine Mangusta valve cover placques are extremely rare.

The headers on this car are stock, but Jet-Hot (or similar) coated. The Mangusta used a very, very inefficient header design, with four tubes just dumping into a single tube, without a collector anywhere in sight. You can see that the tubes are crunched square to match up with the exhaust ports; they are also flattened somewhat to clear the frame rail.

The VIN, by the way, is stamped into the short angled section of chassis just to the left of the left-most header tube in the photo. You can just barely make out the fact that there are some characters, but I can’t make them out.

There is a fellow in Arizona who has been buying up Mangustas and basket-case Mangustas left and right for the past few years; this might be one of his cars that he’s now selling.

The asking price is right in line for what these cars are going for—perhaps even a bit low. A very nice RHD Mangusta that had a beautiful interior and paint job (but known rust issues underneath) sold for over $200K in the UK last year! There’s another RHD Mangusta that is apparently flawless, for sale in Australia for $230K. Those are out-of-this-world prices, but decent Mangustas have been selling for $100-125K for the past couple of years, and the market is finally starting to sit up and notice that these cars came from the same pen as the Miura (Bertone notwithstanding) and offer a design that, while not exactly the same, is similarly stunning and otherworldly, especially by the standards of the other cars around them in the 1960s.

These cars are astoundingly beautiful, but also represent probably the worst chassis engineering ever foisted upon an unsuspecting public. The extreme rearward weight distribution (not helped by the fact they chose to put the battery just ahead of the taillight!!!) coupled with a flexible chassis (engineered to host a lightweight open sports racer body, not a fully trimmed and soundproofed coupe) meant that they would always be challenging. The steering rack is lifted directly from that most plebian of cars, the Renault R4 (WHY???) and has 4.5 turns lock-to-lock, so when the back end starts to come around (and trust me, it will!), all the arm-twiddling in the world won’t be enough to save it.

The first time I drove a Mangusta was during a lunchtime low-speed drive around on a race track in Las Vegas. Ambling along in second gear, really just gently cruising, and I made it almost a complete lap before the back end stepped out to pass me and I wound up facing where I had come from! The owner of the car was sitting with me, and he had no idea how it happened either!

Having said that, it is possible through judicious tuning, tire choice, pressures etc. to make these cars at least somewhat stable. I drove a very well-sorted example from the Nurburgring to Le Mans a few years back, and it never put a foot wrong, despite having been loaded with a 465 hp 342-inch Roush stroker engine.

The suspension in the Mangusta is philosophically identical to that of the GT40 and other race cars of the day. It’s almost infinitely adjustable, meaning there are thousands of ways to get it wrong and only one way to get it right. The Pantera used a much more conventional system, which does still have some adjustability (like a normal car) but which isn’t nearly so complex to set up.

The engine isn’t a ‘stressed member’; it sits in normal-looking motor mounts with rubber isolation bushings. The rear portion of the chassis is made up of square tubing which is very understrength for the job it has to do. Also, there is a removable crossmember at the top above the gearbox which is not properly braced, so the whole back half of the chassis can flex like a cardboard box with the top and bottom open, laid on its side. There is much to be gained by re-engineering this part of the chassis. (A friend in Germany who has a twin-turbo 351C-powered Mangusta wrapped all the tubes with a second layer of steel, which hugely stiffened things up).

The chassis for this car came directly from the stillborn Shelby/De Tomaso 70P project of 1964-65, which was rebodied as the Ghia Sport 5000 for the 1966 show car circuit. That car was going to be an FIA sports racer/Can Am car, but Shelby was contracted by Ford to run the GT40 program, so that took his interest away and he dumped the 70P project. This left Alejandro De Tomaso with bills to pay and nothing to show for it, and he was pissed off! That, by the way, is how the resultant road car became named the Mangusta (Italian for Mongoose). The Mongoose is the only animal in the world that can vanquish a Cobra—get it?

Despite the fact that the chassis was desperately underengineered, the build quality of the Mangusta is absolutely top-notch. They were hand-built by Ghia, although the cars did go down a rudimentary production line. Attention to detail, soundproofing etc. was excellent and they are remarkably quiet and comfortable cars to drive. You had better fit the 1960s Italian demographic though—they were set up for drivers who are 5 foot 6 or so. The windshield comes back at you in a big way, and if you are a six-footer there are just a scant few inches between your forehead and the top of the windshield.

Seat belts? What seat belts? In fact, thanks to some serious political influence by the Rowan family (Isabelle De Tomaso, Alejandro’s wife, came from a very high-society New Jersey family who had megamillions in manufacturing various things) a federal law was passed which exempted small-volume manufacturers from meeting various DOT and EPA regulations, if they brought 500 or fewer examples to the USA each year. This law was short-lived, only a few years, but long enough to allow Mangustas (and other similar cars of the day) to come here without having to meet annoying little rules like seat belts, headlight height etc. The law was changed for the 1970 model year, and the Mangusta’s headlights were too low to meet the DOT standards, so the four-headlight model gave way to a USA-only two-headlight version where the lights were in pop-up buckets. So-called two-headlight Mangustas are not nearly as popular due to their compromised aesthetics, although realistically the differences are rather trivial. The headlight system was as crude as can be—they were operated by a big lever on the floor, attached to cables which raised and lowered them!

Chuck mentioned the Mangusta that was rolled on the Cannonball race in 1999; by sheer coincidence, just this morning somebody sent me a link to Chuck’s site where he published photos of the disaster:

http://www.goolsbee.org/cannonball/images/mangusta/index.html

Finally, Denis C (above) was kind enough to allow me to drive HIS beautiful red Mangusta when I was visiting the De Tomaso clan in Ottawa last year. It was a lovely car, although of course I didn’t push it hard.

He’s a true gentleman and an extremely nice guy—as are almost all the De Tomaso owners I’ve been fortunate enough to meet around the world. ?

To see more of these cars, point your browser at http://www.mangustainternational.com, which hosts a worldwide registry, among other things. Of the 401 Mangustas ever built (including one Spyder, a true styling disaster, it’s 8MA512, look for my photos of it in the registry), it’s estimated that only about 250 of them are still around, and quite a few of them are parked in collections or undergoing restoration etc. Realistically probably more than 150 of them are actually turning wheels on the street, so if you see one underway, consider yourself lucky! And if you get to drive one, consider yourself luckier still!
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fresh pics of my fellow car guy pal Steve B's 'goose' taken just the other day and a bonus shot of a friend of his' toy, wow this replica was really beautiful, and apparently scary QUICK!
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this little 'grocery getter' is now bidding on eBay!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/1970-Detomaso-Mangusta-race-car-very-rare-SCCA-Imsa-HSR-/220955893915?pt=Race_Cars_Not_Street_Legal_&hash=item3371ff609b#ht_500wt_924

here is a video/SOUND!

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy1q9TbHpRQ[/ame]

...ps, anyone know what the blue car in the video next to the Mangusta is? Looks 'chapparallish', but I thought they were all white?

 

Pretty kewl DeTomaso automobilia ya got there John!